Read Pulse (Contemporary new adult/college romance) (Club Grit Trilogy) for Free Online Page B

the life of the party.
    This was supposed to be a fun date to give the whole mess closure and instead, I found myself caring what he thought of me. He wasn’t an Omega sister, he wasn’t in a frat, he didn’t even go to my college and I was sure that if I saw him again at the club it wouldn’t have had to have been a big deal, so why did I care what he thought?
    “Anyways, right now, I’m sort of between classes. I can’t afford to take classes every semester, so I only take them in the fall. During the spring and summer, I work. I’ve done this for four years so far, so I have two years of college done, at a community college, and I’m saving up now so I can get the last two years done all at once.”
    I just couldn’t stop looking in his eyes. In the bright of day, he looked so different, and the glasses he wore were plain, cheap, but drew attention to his eyes which were like two golden suns captured in milk and punctured with the deepest of abysses straight through the middle as if they were meant to be beads on a designer necklace. I watched as the caffeine took hold and his pupils widened, the irises changing slightly as they became thinner and the layers were squished together.
    I lost track of what he was talking about, between sips of my drink and nodding at what I thought was the right time. I thought he noticed so I quickly asked him a question. “So what’s in the bag? Are we going on a picnic?”
    He avoided the question. Fuck. It had been a long time since I’d actually just had a guy to talk to like a normal human being that I guess I forgot what to do. I wasn’t really all that different from the nerdy girls we made fun of at the sorority, the kind that joined academic societies instead of social ones, the kind that weren’t like us, but did have boyfriends who doted on them and surprised them with gifts and went with them to anime conventions. “Let’s take a picture,” he said, and so I pulled out my phone and took a picture with the front facing camera, making a cute pouty face next to his cheek.
    He looked at the picture and smiled, but no for the reason I wanted. “Great, now I can leave,” he said, as he started to get up.
    “Wait, what? Was it the duck face?” I asked. This wasn’t fucking funny but he had to be joking. Maybe he was an ass hat hipster (it’d explain his outfit), but that was no excuse for tasteless humor. Sarcasm was for douchebags who though things like ironic graphic shirts were funny.
    He raised a brow. “Uh, no? I did the date thing. My obligation is over, and you’ve got a picture for your friends to prove I met up with you. I’ve lied for you, but I’m not about to become your girlfriend. I never would, I wouldn’t even sleep with you, because I don’t date or fuck liars and that’s what you are. I shouldn’t have ever given you that cab ride home, Emma. You’ve been more trouble than anyone else I’ve helped. That’s what I try to do: I try to be the nice guy instead of the asshole, and I try to help people, but I just get tangled up in their webs of lies and messes.”
    “Web of lies? What the fuck? If you haven’t guesses, Skylar, I approached you because I thought you were cute. Obviously, that wasn’t a lie,” I insisted.
    “One truth doesn’t make up for the rest of untruths. You’re a liar, Emma. You lied to your friends about getting my number, and I helped you save face more than enough times. How deep is the rabbit hole going to go? What you’re going to do is you’re going to tell your friends about the date going well, show them the picture, and then find a frat boy so that I’ll be last week’s news. It’s a new week, it’s time for you to find someone else to bother.” He already got up and picked up his bag. All this time, he’d been so cool and collected, but he’d been putting on a show, tricking me into thinking that maybe, for once, a guy just wanted to talk, that he wasn’t interested in what was between my